MUSICAL TALES THAT wag a finger or six at values which keep young blood closeted in ignorance have a danger of warming the cockles of the heart even before the curtain rises. Sylvaine Strike’s adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s establishment-rattling work Spring Awakening which was only first performed some […]
WHEN YOU THINK of Amadeus, Peter Shaffer’s perfectly wonderful play of 1979 that cast mischievous light into the mysterious nooks and untold crannies of the life of 18th century Vienna composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the first thing that comes to mind is the music, that Confutatis from Mozart’s […]
IN OUR WORLD of cynicism and hate, of virulent social media and rapidly shifting technology, you may find it hard to believe that Rodgers and Hammerstein’s great 1959 musical The Sound of Music is a total runaway success on a stage in Johannesburg in 2024. Well, you’d be […]
IT ALL BEGINS with a bit of masked and gloved mystique that gets even the littlest of littlies focused on the stage. That is the kind of magical lure you will experience in this version of Alice in Wonderland, that graces the stage this season. And it’s a […]
WHAT, REALLY CONSTITUTES a life-long friendship? Is it the sharing of trauma? Is it found in people who you were schooled with as infants? Is it about the people you found yourself shoved up against in the army? For George (Alan Committie) and Doris (Sharon Spiegel-Wagner), it’s about […]
CHILDREN’S THEATRE REVIEW: ALICE IN WONDERLAND. TAKING A HEAVILY-detailed Victorian foray into a world conditioned by what we would in today’s times call surreal and packing it into one hour for a predominantly contemporary childcentric audience, is one challenge. Arranging it for a cast of but four performers […]
THE SIMPLE, TIMELESS lyrics of Simon and Garfunkel are the kinds of conjoined words and ideas that may have slipped so quietly into your sensibilities that you may not remember how well you know them, until you’re sitting in the audience of the revue of the Simon and […]
IT WAS A show that posed cheeky questions at well-established values, blew smoke in the face of modesty and even cocked a snoot at narrative flow. And this was in 1973, when the Rocky Horror Show first saw light of day. This madcap tale of forbidden pleasures and […]
ICE SHOWS IN Johannesburg are strange phenomena. They come with promises of wow, and a sense of the amazingly exotic. And for the first few minutes after the curtain rises, you’re glowingly aware that the stage is all frozen over and every movement on it is conducted with […]
SAY THE WORD ‘tokoloshe’ and you will have people quivering in their boots for generations. But relieve that scary sprite of his evil associations and you open a rich vein of narrative possibilities that teases open everything from fake news to bullying, fah-fee rhetoric to face time with […]
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